08 October 2012 7:32 PM

Douglas Carswell: ‘The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy’

Douglas Carswell MP - a Roundhead in a party of Cavaliers; a radical Whig in a sea of resolute Tories

If Douglas Carswell had been born 400 years ago, he’d have been burned
at the stake. There’s a touch of superstitious wizardry about his unnerving
prophecy heralding the end of politics, and a fin de siècle inevitability about
his sceptical doom and gloom. His problem is that he’s a Roundhead in a party
of Cavaliers; a radical Whig in a sea of resolute Tories. He’s not just an
irritating nonconformist; he’s a theo-political heretic. And we all know what
happens to them.

But before they meet their grisly end, they tend to preach subversive
sermons and write revolutionary tracts in the hope of winning a few souls to
salvation. Carswell’s fiery homilies eventually brought down Speaker Martin –
the first to be ejected from the Chair of the House of Commons since Sir John
Trevor was forced to resign in 1695. Carswell now blogs profusely and
incisively about how the oligarchical elite feed like parasites on the people,
and how a corrupt and compromised Parliament is incapable of holding the
Executive to account. ‘The End of Politics and the birth of iDemocracy’ is an
analysis of the murky political morass into which we’ve sunk, and an
observation of the emerging technological solutions.

But the book isn’t really about the end of politics, not least because the
end of politics would be an acutely political development with profoundly
political consequences. Politics, like the poor, will always be with us.
Indeed, as long as there are socio-economic divisions and natural
differentiations within humanity, there will be a need for the mechanisms and
systems of governance, and the formulation of social contracts by which
community is ordered. This is and ever will be the stuff of politics. The
crisis which Carswell identifies isn’t so much with politics as with democracy:
“Throughout the West,” he writes, “legislatures have been sidelined. Public
policy is made with little reference to the public.”

His thesis is essentially that ‘big government’ has had its day. This was
also David Cameron’s campaign slogan at the last General Election, and his
premiership was supposed to usher in an era of devolution, localism, mutualism,
civic rejuvenation and social cohesion under the aegis of the ‘Big Society’. We
know he didn’t win the election, but there wouldn’t have been much in this manifesto
to offend a liberal or even the modern adherents of liberal democracy. Whether
you want to call it the ‘Big Society’, ‘One Nation’ or ‘Compassionate
Conservatism’, at its heart is the individual advancing fraternally in
community: the monolithic institutions of government give way to human
responsibility and free association.

Carswell is of the view that the West is in a state of acute crisis – financial
and political. As each problem presents itself in Greece, Ireland, Spain, the
United States and, indeed, the whole European Union, the elite respond with
more bureaucracy and regulation – more government – which has the effect of
killing innovation and stifling the very means of wealth creation. He blasts
the various grand designs of the ‘socialist blueprint’ – ‘Communist
teachings... Catholic teachings’, preferring a natural, organic self-ordering.
This may be a utopian vision, but without reformation the West will simply go
the way of the great empires of the past. Like Babylon, Greece, Rome, Britain
and Russia, the Western Empire is corrupting and bankrupting the people: it is
the architect of its own fall.

The pervasive economic pessimism is garnished with an abundance of
financial statistics, ratios and percentages – taxation, debt, interest, inflation,
deficit, GDP – in the billions and trillions (he combines into zillions) of dollars,
pounds, euros and yen. We are persuaded of the incontrovertible fact that the
West is stagnant and declining while China, India and Brazil are dynamic and
growing. The stats and graphs are interspersed with 1000 years of historic development
in the incremental separation of the state’s powers – from Henry I’s Charter of
Liberties, through Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and on to the Glorious Revolution
and the Bill of Rights.

And he takes us through the gradual emergence of liberty in the
Enlightenment era, through the Founding Fathers of the United States of America,
weaving in and out of Europe’s bloody revolutions. He throws in Pigou, Descartes,
Keynes, Laski and Hayek. Far from being a Burkean ‘little Englander’, Carswell
is global in his grasp of economics and latitudinal in his understanding of political
philosophy.

Interestingly, he doesn’t define the West in terms of a geographic
entity. And neither is it an ethnic nor a theological one, expressed through Anglo-Saxon
culture or some concept of Christendom. By including Australia, New Zealand and
Japan along with the USA, Canada and (parts of) Europe, Carswell defines the
term philosophically. The West, he says, is where government is dispersed and
power devolved to the people: it is the spirit of Magna Carta embodied in the Constitution of the USA. To be ‘truly Western’ is to grasp ‘limited
government and the existence of internal constraints on power’.

Contra this is the re-emergence of autocracy and divine right, even in
those nations which long ago eschewed top-down, dirigiste decision-making by the few for the many; by the elite
oligarchs for the plebeian masses. And so we witness again the inculcation of an
‘official mind’ or public policy dogma which prescribes a prevailing
socio-political orthodoxy. The battle is against the vested interests of Officialdom
– the politicians, civil servants, regulators, central bankers, business leaders
and newspaper editors: “This elite are to our world what priests and princes
would have been to the medieval masses; they interpret the world, explain
events and at times claim an authority to decide what happens next.”

That quasi-religious theme is a leitmotif of the book. Carswell puts the
secret of the West’s success down to the fact that there was never a unified
state – ‘Power remained dispersed and diffused.’ Attempts to centralise and
coordinate in accordance with a deliberate plan hindered social and economic
development. When power was dispersed and constrained, there could be no deliberate
design, ‘despite the best efforts of the medieval papacy, the Habsburgs,
Napoleon and the Kaiser’.

Thus Copernicus is lauded ‘for challenging the doctrines of the
Catholic Church’, and post-Reformation Europe is credited with producing the states
and statelets necessary for inspiration and constant competition. Carswell admires
the innovation, ingenuity and enterprise of Protestant groups like the
Huguenots, and pays tribute to those who put to death a king ‘who, like his
peers in Spain and France, believed his right to reign was conferred from on
high’. In 1688 the English were effectively saved when they ‘imported a Dutch
king who brought with him an appreciation of the fact that the right to reign
came from below’. It is an unapologetically Whiggish view of history.

And now we observe a kind of counter-Reformation and anti-Enlightenment
being effected by the EU, which is staffed by mandarins ‘possessed of an almost
celestial arrogance’. The Treaty of Rome, we are reminded, ‘established a
pan-European political authority for perhaps the first time since the collapse
on the Roman Imperium in the fourth century’. And so increasingly they micro-engineer
all human and social affairs throughout the European Empire.

But rejoice, for into the pervasive gloom and doom irrupts the white light
of Information Technology. The digital revolution heralds a counter-counter-reformation,
in which the priestly technocrats of the central-directing authority will be displaced
once again by the laity, the ordinary citizens armed with the internet, blogs, Facebook,
Twitter, iPhones and iPads. It will be democracy by personalised App.

The future is in the fragmented, spontaneous, personalised and individual:
libertarian anarchy is about to go mainstream. And I don’t think he’s wrong in
this: already we are seeing less reliance on ‘experts’. Blogs such as this one
have transformed not only how news travels, but how that truth is
conceptualised and imparted. No longer do journalists subscribe to an ‘official’
editorial line; facts are coloured by personal perspectives which can (and does)
include the eccentric, offensive and heretical. And such views can now ‘go
viral’ on platforms like YouTube, unimpeded by the ‘priesthood of pundits’ who
are now deprived of their powers to interpret, filter or censor what they
determine to be disagreeable.

“Let the people think they govern and they will be governed,” observed
William Penn in 1682. Perhaps Google has ushered in ‘choice and competition, in
commerce, ideas and everything’. Or perhaps it’s only an illusion, brilliantly concealed
behind our trance-inducing playlists on Spotify. If iPods are the pattern for tomorrow’s
public services, we are witnessing the demise of the political party. As George
Galloway observed when he crushed Labour in the 2012 Bradford West by-election,
‘our media was social media... Twitter, Facebook and YouTube... at the touch of
a button, I can speak to thousands of people... our election campaign was built
entirely outside the Westminster bubble’.

Thus is the future of politics, democracy and liberty. Douglas Carswell
has decided that it’s better to fight for freedom on the backbenches than
to be in the Cabinet as a slave. But his day will come, and Biteback have published
his brilliant, compelling manifesto for the future.

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ADRIAN HILTON

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, religious and political commentator, journalist and best-selling author. He is a former parliamentary candidate and adviser to the Secretary of State for Education, and he lectures in the UK and the US on politics and philosophy. He holds a Guinness World Record for the longest marathon theatre performance by an individual for a non-stop dramatic recital of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, which was inaugurated by the Duke of Edinburgh on the site of the Globe Theatre in July 1987. He is a Council member of The Freedom Association, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and writes for The Spectator on arts and culture (with occasional forays into politics and religion).